remove the social and scent making effects from skunk spray

[kevingranade]

These are kind of random and unjustified, and I'm already seeing copycats.

Summary

None

Purpose of change

It was brought to my attention in #74920 that skunk spray had these weird social modifiers.

If we're going to have "you smell bad/you're dirty/etc therefore you have social penalties, it needs to be some intermediate effect that we can keep track of, not "every effect in the game potentially does arbitrary things to your social checks".

That's a big if, it's quite a stretch that, "you smell bad therefore npcs assume you're lying".

Likewise something else that keeps coming up, almost nothing should have the scent masking effect, scent doesn't work like that. Dogs might not track someone that has been sprayed by a skunk, but that's not because they can't, it's because they won't. Meanwhile zombies don't care, and they're the dominant creator we care about wrt scent.

Describe the solution

Remove the extra effects.

[idling-left]

This change makes no sense. An overpowering smell should apply scent masking because the scent now covers your human scent, which is what the zombies would be chasing after, zombies don't chase wherever skunks spray so why would they follow you if that's the only thing they can smell? As for the social checks, I agree with removing the bonus intimidate, but increased ugliness should stay, smelling terrible does not make you attractive. As for the social checks, it's hard to say, if there isn't a precedent for having less charisma and less persuasion for looking badly then they shouldn't be there, but if that isn't true then you shouldn't make an exception here just because it doesn't make sense to you.

Also why keep the int debuff? Why does smelling bad make you less smart?

[kevingranade]

As I said in the PR, scent simply doesn't work that way, this is based on papers from the FBI researching what will misdirect a bloodhound (tl;dr nothing). If a scent tracking creature were itself sprayed that might work due to pure irritation of the tissues being used for scent detection, but otherwise creatures that use scent for tracking just aren't susceptible to scent masking in that way. The only way you're going to manage to hide your scent is to keep it from being dropped in the first place.

increased ugliness should stay, smelling terrible does not make you attractive.

That's not really what ugliness is used for.

As for the social checks, it's hard to say, if there isn't a precedent for having less charisma and less persuasion for looking badly then they shouldn't be there

AFAIK this was the first thing that that added such effects, if there are any others they should be removed too.

if that isn't true then you shouldn't make an exception here just because it doesn't make sense to you.

This effect doing that IS the exception, as I said in the PR description, even if we do want these effects to happen, which I'm skeptical of, they need to be systemic, not applied as a one-off thing to specific effects like this.

Also why keep the int debuff? Why does smelling bad make you less smart?

Because I missed it, follow up PR real soon.

[TheMurderUnicorn]

I understand your logic behind this, you're right that it shouldn't affect social things, I just assumed no one wants to talk to a guy who was just sprayed by a skunk. But it in my opinion, if you remove everything except perception and nausea, it removes any reason to have the skunks spray and they should just not spray at all. The whole reason I made the attack a spell was to have these bonus modifiers, I don't know.. I think having it increase your scent mask makes sense and removing that doesn't make sense, because it means you're easier to track but I understand that you're saying it's not consistent among other things. I would push back and say that if we never start then it will never become consistent. I don't know. I get the rationale for the majority of things but I don't understand what the issue is with having an attack make you more easily tracked by scent for a few hours.

[zachary-kaelan]

I don't understand what the issue is with having an attack make you more easily tracked by scent for a few hours

There was a confusion about what SCENT_MASK does. The name makes it seem like it masks your scent instead of making you more smelly. It should be renamed to STENCH or something then that element can be readded.